An understanding of place value and the ability to manipulate numbers to make ten and multiples of ten is critical to success in 3rd grade. If students haven't mastered these skills, or even if they have , this time will be well spent.

This is a quick review of regrouping in 2 digit addition using place value cubes. I suggest not having students write out any of the numbers during the guided practice because this allows them to dedicate more of their focus on manipulating the cubes/values. Prior to the lesson, I prepare a class set of bags with 20 tens (longs) and 30 ones in each. If you don't have a class set of cubes, do what I did and borrow from colleagues. It's worth the effort to create a set for each child!

This tactile experience with regrouping is good for students. Content is learned differently when there is an associated physical action!

Students always want to build towers and designs with the cubes. How do I manage this? I find that it’s worthwhile to acknowledge that they are, in fact, children and I give them 8 minutes to play with the blocks prior to teaching. It makes them happy. The 8 minutes spent in creative play is a tiny price to pay for engagement afterwards. After 8 minutes, the blocks turned back into tools!

I work through 5 different examples with the students, and walk the room after each step in the process to ensure that students are practicing all the steps. This is a solid, brief review even for students who have previously mastered this skill.

The one-to-one assessment consists of two-digit addition problems, in which I ask students to combine the ones place into tens using place value blocks. I ask them questions as they work through the problem if I need further clarification on why they make certain choices.

I create a variety of regrouping problems to test different skills. Depending on their individual needs, students work on some of the following: regrouping to an even ten, regrouping with more than 10 total, sums of less than 100, sums of more than 100, 3 addends. I also put in few problems to encourage them to be flexible thinkers. I want to see if they would not regroup when it was unnecessary.

The one-to-one assessment consists of two-digit addition problems, in which I ask students to combine the ones place into tens using place value blocks. I ask them questions as they work through the problem if I need further clarification on why they make certain choices.

Resources (2)

Resources

I ask students to think for a moment about which of the strategies they used in today's lesson was the most helpful to them and why. They share their thinking with a partner, and I circulate to encourage precision of language in describing the strategy and also to listen for any misconceptions.

I have found that there are situation where I am asked to provide a printable version of this lesson. Here is a lesson transcript containing all the section narratives. The resources are linked, but will still need to be downloaded.

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Big Idea:
In order to approximate a total, or to help check the reasonableness of an answer, students need to be able to round to the nearest 10 or 100. Check out this lesson for a fun game that gives them practice rounding, adding, and subtracting.